Rising Online Sales Make E-Commerce Sites Confident

With 10 million transactions, the internet may soon be your favourite shop, too.

With e-commerce expected to grow by 47 per cent to Rs 46,520 crore by end-2011 (as per IAMAI data), offline players like Future Bazaar are fine-tuning their approach online.

Futurebazaar.com is confident of netting online sales of Rs 1 crore per day by March 2012. “The main focus will be to switch offline shoppers to online portal,” claims Kashyap Deorah, its president. “Footfall is the core asset of any retail business. If we get even three per cent of the footfall that we get in our stores to shop online, the job is done.”

The Future Group boasts of offline sales of up to Rs 30 crore per day. Deorah believes that the online target is not difficult to reach, since they have been doubling their business every quarter. The portal, he adds, has already handled 15,000 orders a day, clocking business of up to Rs 3 crore. Next, Futurebazaar.com is set to enter mobile commerce by this month-end.

Futurebazaar.com competes with other e-commerce sites like Yebhi.com, Letsbuy.com, eBay, Flipkart, Homeshop18 and Infibeam. Flipkart.com, a leading e-commerce portal, too is confident of hitting its 2015 revenue target of $1 billion sooner. The portal has already invested in warehouses across the country and automation to speed up its delivery.

Avendus Capital’s report on digital consumer estimates that total number of users transacting online in India is currently at 8-10 million. It is expected to increase to 39 million by 2015. “E-commerce companies,” states Avendus Capital, “are growing on the back of promises to address what the Indian consumer desires the most — convenience, value for the money one spends and availability of his desired products and services.”

Futurebazaar.com is looking at 10 per cent of sales to come from online platform over the next three years. Deorah admits that while customers are not yet used to shopping online, they are not shying away either. “Around 80 per cent of consumers who go online to buy a mobile phone ended up buying it offline,” he notes. “One has to understand that the competition is not with a rival e-commerce portal, but with unorganised retail.”

Future Group’s e-commerce portal is also looking to reduce the number days required for delivery of a product. On an average, it takes four days to deliver an item to a consumer in the present conditiion. Futurebazaar.com is aiming to bring it down to three days.

Avendus Capital believes this will also drive the overall growth of the e-commerce space in India, with revenue per online shopper increasing at a similar pace.

Vizisense confirms that a consumer is comfortable buying not just books or apparels but also expensive electronic items online. It estimates that mobile phones garner the maximum share of e-commerce at 31 per cent, followed by Home & Kitchen appliances at 13 per cent and cameras at 10 per cent.

Experian Marketing Services says shopping and classifieds now rank 6th in terms of online visit share as compared to its 8th rank last year. Says Navin Chandani, its managing director (India): “Even though there is still a heavy tilt on the internet for information gathering and product evaluation and selection, actual purchase for many is still a physical world activity.”